ragged
by stilessttilinski
Summary: There are no words to describe the feeling you get when he smiles at you, though you put in a miraculous amount of effort into finding the word to such a feeling. - Albus/Scorpius, AU.


**NOTES: This is for SUMMER (**_NOVAKED_**), my lovely friend whose birthday was recent. Here is a shitty Albus/Scorpius that I tried ridiculously hard on. Happy late birthday, and sorry for the wait! **

**(I do not own any of the characters or the quote, only the plot.)**

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__**ragged**

_"It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight."_ _-Vladmir Nabokov_

The first time Albus decides to show you old Elvis Presley on an primeval record player is, decidedly, the moment you realize you are fucked. The moment that comes twenty-two seconds later, when you look up and he is bobbing his head, shaking wildly the mess that he deems 'hair', is when you give up and allow yourself the pleasure of falling.

You don't think much about him specifically, really, it's more the possibility of _us_ that keeps him lingering at the back of your mind – where the thoughts are the most incongruous, and nonsensical, and utterly, utterly wonderful.

Your thoughts, however, are subject to betrayal, and accompanying thoughts of _us_ are also thoughts of men who are beaten for a misplaced hand, men whose furtive looks are punished with a blow to the back of the head, a swift kick to the stomach.

There are no words to describe the feeling you get when he smiles at you, though you put in a miraculous amount of effort into finding the word to such a feeling. You do not say love – though you do later - because love is too simple a word to accurately describe the torrents of desire creeping in the pads of your fingers, the frantic cadence of your heart against your ribcage, the consistent ache that becomes _want_ and then _need_ and then just there. You are fond of the holes between the socks and the spaces between his toes, the kicked up corners of his smile, the hollow of his clavicle. Love is quantifiable, this, this certainly is not. (Love, however, is simpler a term. It is also quantifiably easier to say 'love' than it is to wax poetic every time you see him.)

You love him to the creases in his cheeks and the white of his bones. Some part of you wants to lead him astray, lead him away from this 1960's impression of 'homosexuals,' and the desire to kiss him burns in you from the beginning to forever.

Once you accept your inexorable love for this stupid, idiotic, beautiful boy, you can breathe. Oxygen filters into your system finally and you feel your copper heart rusting in the aftermath. It's awful and at the same time, painfully pleasing, almost as if you were a pyromaniac and he was the fire constantly being taken away from you. The two of you are, infuriatingly, best friends and you listen to Elvis Presley together in the dim to dark of his bedroom, and it might mean something, it might even become something. The easy grin to an affectionate smile, the tongue swiping across his own mouth to a languid lick into yours –

Thinking too long about a desire is essentially giving up and allowing yourself a bit of recklessness, but you have always been about order. And so you let yourself build the thought, build and build and build until you shatter it, a practiced motion.

Maybe it is not that you are afraid of public repercussion, but self-repercussion, and it's too difficult to tell the difference because you might just be a little disgusted with yourself, too.

You are ragged beside him. There is an incompetency in you that you are sure you cannot fill, for yourself or anyone else, and why do you bother to worry? Why do you worry about flaws you can't fix, when the possibility of us is so absurd, laugh and laugh and laughable. The kind of laughable where you feel almost like crying.

Are there happy endings for people like you? For you who smiles so unobtrusively at another man's laugh? For you who fights against the condemned, and allows the regret to sheath you in your mind? It is something you envisage, an ending in which your hands circle his wrists and his pulse beats reassurance into your hands, and your kisses break down the walls in the minds of everyone around you. You imagine this quite a lot, more often than you should – but you have always done things more often than you should. After all, he is the habit you cannot seem to break, no matter how hard you pull at its frays.

He asks you questions a lot, mostly about what you like and what you don't but sometimes about who you _are_, and those questions terrify you because the only right answer you seem to want to give is that you are dreadfully in love and even more afraid.

You think you could say it, with the firelight playing its shadow games across the planes of his face and the warmth making you dizzy (or maybe that's just him), but you do not. Before you start, you think obscurely about how badly you play poker. You take a breath, place your bet, and,

"I need to tell you something." He nods and tilts his head to the side, at an angle that only allows his face to catch more of the luminescent fire. You feel like stumbling, but you attempt to continue. "I lo – I l – I –" You break off abruptly, appropriately, the words seizing in your throat and threatening to asphyxiate you, in your fright and sorrow and regret. You have never been more ashamed of yourself than in that instance, not before in the many times you recount having almost told him, not in the moment you came to the realization you loved him. Your failed attempt is your closest, and you inherently know it will remain the closest for the rest of your life onwards.

He does not prompt you to continue, only smiles a smile that knows too much. Perhaps you are delusional. The fire tends to play tricks on your eyes. The only thing to do at this point is to stare helplessly back, your gaze flickering between his eyes and your lifetime, and inside you pray for redemption. A chance, possibly, in another time, to kiss the boy and have his image imprinted on your eyelids, instead of flashes of a bruised body and '_no'_ and cruel twists of their mouths. Love is the catalyst, as it always is, as it always should be. The feeling you do not bother to deny should be enough for the idea of _us_.

The fear devastates you, becomes you, breaks you, makes you. You were not born brave. When he touches your shoulder, your insides are cold.

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